Welcome to uploading the podcast where we take you behind the wheel with the world's best creators, marketers and professionals who have cracked the code on how to profit through content. You'll learn the ins and outs of content, strategy, creation, production, distribution, growth platforms, tools and more. If you haven't already, be sure to join Cas Magic, the all in one content workspace for professionals. Be sending out tips from our shows in our weekly newsletter. And we've also got a slack community of over a thousand creators, so make sure to drop in and say hello. And now get ready for the show. Welcome to today's episode of uploading. And today we're talking with Ken Yarvish.

He is a business coach. He previously scaled remote agency to over $5 million in revenue. And today we're going to talk a lot about scaling businesses without burning too much cash. We're going to talk about how to find high quality clients and also how to thrive as a solopreneur business founder and build systems that work for you. So, uh, Ken, one of the reasons I'm really excited to chat with you is because you are also a fellow founder. You're not someone who's just like coming up with ideas and telling people what to do. You've been in it yourself. So why don't we start a little bit with your background and we can kind of get into all the, the systems that you built and what you see in the space.

Yeah, man, I appreciate that. And founder to founder, I've been building stuff for decades. You know, I know people will mostly listen to this if they check it out on video later. Like, I've got a little bit of a baby face, but not quite now with the kids and so forth over the last decade. But yeah, I've been a builder and I think that's the most important thing as I've been building from day one into getting into business started. And this will date me a little bit. But the Internet didn't exist, right? And when the Internet started kind of coming out, I was like, oh, this is really, this is going to change the game. So everything from websites, built the first blogs, built the first social apps, then went all in into building the first iPhone and Android apps.

Got a lot of clients, both well known brands as well as startups, helped a lot of people bootstrap things as well as some funded startups, and really kind of just kept following that trajectory. With the exception maybe now. Leave it to you, Blaine, and your crew. I have not fallen into the AI space in terms of building AI myself, but I love tools like, like cast magic. That's why I'm happy to be here today. Um, but trying to now take all those lessons learned. And I was remote before remote was a thing. Trying to build, not with headcount before, that was a thing.

And I'm kind of leading the charge on that today. So really just trying to shortcut people like yourself and, and agent agency founders, solopreneurs consultants. Years of struggles that I went through because I tried to find someone like myself who really didn't exist, because this is still a new thing in the history of, of business to build it this way. So, yeah, man, excited to chat through this today, and I'll let you lead to charge.

Yeah, and maybe I think that's a great place to start. So why don't you tell us a little bit about your first business and kind of how you transitioned operationally to keep things light. I think that's something that's really top of mind for a lot of different business operators and founders isn't just, it's not just about doing the thing, it's how do you do the thing efficiently? Right. How do you minimize unnecessary headcount? Like, remove operational burdens? Like, yeah, just tell me about your experience figuring that out.

And I'm going to go back, and I won't be, you know, back in, you know, 1983, but I'll walk you through the journey a little bit, because I was pushing back against a lot of things that are conventional in business. And even today, sometimes we'll say, like, that's not the way people do it. Yeah, it's called, we're building business for this century. So, as an example, people told me, you got to move to San Francisco or to New York to be relevant. And I decided not to do that, even though I explored that I had really good opportunities to join some great companies then. Remote was an offshore thing, and you couldn't scale remote. And then this thing called 2020 happened, and people realized that business can operate. And that was, you know, not even remote by choice.

That was just remote being forced. Um, so kind of going through this, I saw the heavy expenses of being part of very well funded startups our startups had. And I was like an early employee in certain cases before I became the founder, but we had the best money. I won't name drop, but it was the best money. And the CEO's of those companies, you know what they did? They went out and hired based on college degrees. They went out and hired based on names. X this, x this x this again. I'm not going to out names today.